Many types of instruments have been developed for measuring acceleration. One such example is a force-balanced accelerometer. For example, in a pendulous electrostatic force-balanced accelerometer, electrostatic forcing in a closed loop system is employed to position and obtain an output from a pendulous inertial mass or proof mass. The electrostatic forcing system may employ a capacitive pickoff electrode on each side of a pendulous member that has been etched from a silicon substrate. A control pulse can be employed to sequentially apply a constant amount of charge to each electrode. A variable force can be applied to the inertial mass by varying the amount of time (e.g., duty cycle) the charge is left on a respective plate. The amount of time the charge is left on a respective plate is based on the displacement of the inertial mass relative to a null position. However, electrostatic force-balanced accelerometers can be subject to a number of deleterious phenomena, such as accelerometer bias uncertainty which can be a major source of error in inertial measurement and/or navigation systems. Bias uncertainty can arise due to transient behavior at turn on, non-modelability, and instability of bias versus temperature characteristics including hysteresis and simply trend over time. In addition, pendulous electrostatic force-balanced accelerometers can be subject to damage from excessive input accelerations that can result in changes in the bias and scale-factor, which could require additional calibration of the accelerometer.